


Old Friends

by JaxxCapta



Category: Warframe
Genre: Gen, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 03:09:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18002669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaxxCapta/pseuds/JaxxCapta
Summary: Umbra had a life before Ballas. His son had a life before Ballas. So did the Operator.What if these intersected, in serendipitous yet painful ways?(Might become where I deposit stories about Umbra and the Operator.)





	Old Friends

His son had a friend.

They were inseparable, they had known each other from the day their parents left them with the same caretaker, they might as well have been siblings. By the time Isaah actually had siblings, he'd grown so used to the concept of sharing toys, jokes, secrets, that it felt more like a matter of waiting for them to grow old enough to join him and his friend in their antics than entirely reshuffling their social spheres.

If one child's parents needed help, the others stepped in. They shared no blood, but they might as well have. They had been brought together, they ought to make the best of it.

He and his son had friends.

School began, and the duo were at his home as often as they were not. The nervous house Cephalon took a full semester, more than, to sort out the schedule they conformed to. Mostly conformed to. More than once the duo haggled for more time at each other's homes, or to go play instead of doing work. On rare occasions, he acquiesced. Perhaps more often if they were distracted by the komi board or the sound of his shawzin.

He admitted a few weaknesses.

It was the child's mother who broke the news to him. They were selected to be one of the first people to settle the Tau system. It fit them well, he said then. Her grandmother had been on the team which created the Sentients. Situated proudly in their home was an image of the renowned scientist, beaming, with one of the biomechanical creatures snuggled into her lap. She called it a vomvalyst.

The congratulations wore away as packing began and the launch date approached. Small arguments chipped at Isaah's relationship with his dearest friend, born out of mourning and worry. He patched them as best he could, and helped organize one last day together, all of them.

As the children played, kicking a ball around while Isaah's siblings desperately tried to keep up, the parents sat back and fussed. Would communications be set up in a reasonable time span? What would happen if messages couldn't get back and forth? Did the Sentients understand human needs as well as everyone expected them to? What if it never felt like home?

They could not attend the actual launch, but he watched it with Isaah, projected in the middle of the sitting room, lights dimmed so it was the only thing to pay attention to. He heard Isaah's aggrieved sobs and held him close through it, wiping away the stray tears running down his own cheeks.

The Sentients returned with a vengeance.

The Orokin hemorrhaged in those first few years. Solutions became more desperate. Bigger weapons, better weapons, biological warfare. Leadership churned as officers died. He did not climb the ranks so much as desperately cling to the rungs and haul himself up.

As a general, he became privy to the Orokin's dirty secrets.

Ones like the warframe project.

Ones like the Zariman Ten-Zero.

He kept his own secrets, his fear and worries battened down as he watched the feral beasts Ballas deemed failures fling themselves into their final battle, a last-ditch effort to keep the Sentients at bay. So many of them, marked with wounds even before they entered the fight. They dug into each other and themselves as much as they did the Sentients, but these marks looked planned.

They announced the warframes fixed, one day, courtesy of the mysterious Tenno. He found himself planning for more and more varieties of these warframes. Only a scant few went on each mission. Yet they slaughtered anything they went up against.

He had his suspicions. Those suspicions dug into traitorous acts.

Ballas killed Isaah, decades after the Zariman Ten-Zero left its dock, for having made a friend.

Umbra never asked the Tenno who found him about the past, before the Zariman. He did not need to. He recognized the eyes – though the shine behind them was different, worn down – and the angles of the face. He recognized the laugh, on the rare times he heard it. He recognized the scent of sweet mint tea; centuries of isolation could not take that, after all the times he had brewed it.

So many of his fears abated, only for new ones to arise. As he calmed, as the child he had once known, now maturing with the same awkward, painful, yet determined steps he had seen in Isaah and all his other children – though the context was so different – helped him through the pain of what he remembered, he found resolve.

For the family he had once known, for Isaah, he would take this child in, even if nothing could be as it was before.


End file.
